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Comparing Codecs for 2004
MunchMunch writes "Popular encoding/guide/news site doom9.org has just put up its codec shoot-out for 2004, comparing 3ivx 5.0, Divx Fusion 5.9 (prerelease 6.0), Nero Digital Main Profile and High Profile, RealVideo 10, On2 VP6, VideoSoft's VSS, Xvid 1.0, MS's WMV9 and, last, newcomer Jomingo's HDX4. The comparison covers the speed, accuracy, target-file-size-adherence and other aspects of the codecs -- but also lets you compare yourself via high- and low-bandwidth framegrabs of each codec with a nice zoomable image-swap script."
Nero Digital won on quality, but for both speed and quality, doom9.org concludes XviD is currently the best solution.
I realize it's not available yet, but it's coming...and frankly, it's pretty amazing. Scales from 3G handheld devices to HD content, already part of the forthcoming HD-DVD and Bluray Disc formats, not to mention being an ITU and MPEG standard, etc.
OGM is only a file container, so it doesnt matter.
And ogg theora is a VERY outdated version of the vp codec. VP6.x was tested, theora is based on vp4.something, a more than 2 years outdated codebase.
draw you own conclusions
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
MP3 files most definately have frames:
http://www.id3.org/mp3frame.html
http://www.dv.co.yu/mpgscript/mpeghdr.htm
Theora is still in alpha stages and still has many problems with it. Currently it doesn't stand a chance with the codecs in the shoot-out, especially with the bitrates they were using in the tests.
That being said, remember that Theora is already pretty useful for low bitrate Internet streams.
x264 is a free (GPL) implementation done by one of the French guys of the videolan team (who made the VLC player). ./configure options).
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http://www.videolan.org/x264.html
MPlayer-pre6 now supports it. You just need to compile the x264 codec, and compile MPlayer with the x264 libraries linked (see
I tried it, it is very promising.
Apparently it also works with transcode and has a Win32 version too.
See alsothis thread about using mencoder and x264:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=83
Michael Niedermayer is the author and afaik he works for fraunhofer. but i believe the snow video codec is based on wavelets, no more blocks, and is open source.
but i dont have an account so this will be buried at score 0.
i cant believe nobody on slashdot knows of this great codec. which as i said is supported by mencoder/mplayer now!
Theora is based on VP3.2
Theora also has some changes that allow potentially much higher quality - although the reference encoder doesn't use them yet. Also the current reference encoder tries to encode noise very faithfully, and that causes noticeable quality issues (especially "beating" at low bitrates on noisy source data). Having said that, I normally find Theora to be noticeably better quality at the same bitrate than DivX.
Wasn't FLC an animation format used mostly on DOS? Amiga users had CDXL, one of the first codecs capable of streaming video from a cd, and playable on a 1x drive with a 7mhz cpu.. Obviously the quality is nothing compared to modern formats, but for it's time it was amazing.. It predates mpeg by several years for instance.
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Despite what you say about Theora, it is stable enough to stream all of Guadec.
See www.theora.org for news/code/video samples.
Googling for "What is AVC?" bring up this. I'm confused as to if they're saying AVC will be stardard in HD-DVD? Is WM9 an AVC? If not, will both be options for HD-DVD content providers? I ask because in the shootout WM9 didn't look very good. Relatively it blurs more of the scene than xvid.
I think you have to use a command line encoder that only accepts some weird raw picture format which by my (and most other persons', I presume) standards is just silly and in no way usable (*). Unless mencoder supports it, of course. But that still doesn't work with his usual toolchain.
(*): And don't come with that "oh, but it's alpha software. Things like that can wait!" because it won't get any use or testing at all if they keep it that way. So when 1.0 finally comes out they get bashed for its horrible quality and have to spend months tuning their encoder again, doing work they could have saved themselves had they had better testing from the start. That's how I guess it's going to be when 1.0 finally comes around.
PS: I still think it's a pretty cool project and with the java implementation for streaming, it would be very nice to see more wide-spread use of Theora, but I won't be holding my breath.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
A quote from the Theora faq:
So there! Theora is optimized VP3, which means there's a good chance it would turn out to be a faster codec. But as far as visual quality is concerned Theora is likely to be just as good or just as bad as VP3.On2 itself is well represented in the survey by its VP6 codec, and judging from the pseudo version numbers on the codec names, it should be safe to assume that VP3 is inferior to VP6 (VP6 - VP3 = 3 generations of development).
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Theora is based on On2's VP3 and this codec was removed from Doom9.org's codec comparisons long ago, because it's old and didn't have significant (if any) improvement in quality. The same thing happend with "DivX ;-) 3" (the hacked MS codec).
These codecs have not been removed, because the Doom9 guy hate them or something, but because the old test results still apply and testing them over and over again would just be a waste of time.
IIRC VP3 (and DivX 3) was removed in 2003. So check out a comparison from 2003 to see how it performs.
And, yes, those stairs, rain and especially faces ARE blurred in real life.
What, you have glaucoma? Are you near-sighted? Go buy some glasses.
The original picture WAS crisp, and there's no reason why the encoded version shouldn't be. We get most of our information from visual sources and so our demand for high-quality visuals will never go down. Normal people take time even distinguishing 64k AAC clips from the original sometimes. But with visuals it's easy to spot artifacts.
divx is watchable and a good size/quality compromise.
Yes, and maybe 64k MP3 is good enough for you. It's not for most people. Be happy, you have what you want. Let the developers develop for the rest of the human population who care.
You can get a 90 minute film onto a cd, for instance.
Yes and as development continues that same 90-minute film on the CD will look closer and closer to the original.
If, in the future, you can encode a 90 minute hdtv into 700mb with no quality loss
This is impossible to do losslessly - that's why we're developing lossy codecs. There will always be a tradeoff between quality and file-size, but it will continue to improve, barring people like you who claim everything is fine, fine. The point of technology is progress. If you're happy with your LPs and your black and white TV, fine, but don't go ruining it for the rest of us.
hardware needed to decode and render the film will probably not use cds.
Uh, what?
IFF is a container format, so it's like saying you're watching an AVI. What type of IFF animation? IFF ANIM, IFF ANIM+SLA, IFF ANIM+ANFI?
MP3 files most definately have frames
Ever wondered why MP3 files aren't "gapless" and there are short gaps of silence between tracks that should otherwise run together? This is why. It's not a problem with your player; it's the way the MP3 spec works... it pads your sound file out to be a multiple of x samples.
- Default:
129,002 bytes
- OptiPNG: 121,967 bytes
- PNGOUT:
113,759 bytes
It may not seem much, but it adds up. Sometimes you can reduce the bit depth (for gray scale), make a palette (for drawings and charts that don't need 64 bits of color depth), and reduce resolution. Some more tricks are at Baseline JPEG and JPEG2000 Artifacts Illustrated.I love my $60 Philips DVP 642 Divx/Xvid stand-alone DVD Player:= 2598455 0 204SWE
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20465
http://walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product_id
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
When they make a $60 DVD player for other codecs than MPEG2/MPEG4 I'll be interested. Until then, why bother if something is a little bit better? A WMV9 DVD player would probably be another $50 and not worth it (not that they even exist right now).
...which was what I linked to.
I have a Liteon 2001 DVD player. When it first came out, Divx had all kinds of problems on it. It did well just a play a movie; fast-forwarding and rewinding were luxuries.
Luxuries saved for Xvid. Xvid has always played absolutely perfect on it. I can FFW and FRW like it was an ordinary MPEG2, I can seek to a time and the pause is very small. It reads DVDRW's like they were mastered DVD's. It plays Vorbis and can handle WMV, as well nested directory structures.
I did my own little comparison here, just recently. I tried using low bitrates with Divx 5.2.1, and low bitrates with both Nic's and Koepi's Xvid binaries. Xvid utterly won out, not to mention that the Divx encoder would hang when I selected options that it deemed "fucking insane".
I choose Xvid because it works for me, all the time, with whatever I throw, at or in, with it. It works with bare minimal effort on my part. I don't have to use the "right" encoding program, I don't have to choose the "right" resolution and quanitizer matrix, I don't have to have to keep high bitrates.
WMV9 is a competitor to AVC. HD DVD and Blu-ray support MPEG-2, AVC, and WMV9, so content providers can choose any of the three.
Actually it is severely patent encumbered. There is absolutely no way to create an MPEG4 codec without violating *a lot* of patents. How does XviD get around this? The XviD project claims to be an educational/research project. Note that the XviD project cannot officially release binaries as I believe this would require the payment of royalties. Otherwise its in a gray area of the law.